Scraping the Barrel: 2015's Worst Movies

Courtesy of Image Entertainment The Cobbler
"A man-child comedian matures at a crawl, kicking and screaming and clinging to what sold seats before. Like Robin Williams before him, Sandler's done hapless romantics, he's done dads, he's done drag. Now it's time to play outright villains in movies braver than The Cobbler, movies that admit the darkness roiling under his smile." —Amy Nicholson
1/13

Courtesy of Lionsgate Don Verdean
"Rockwell is charmless in a role that seems to be written that way. Verdean is a terrible lead for a farce, a shut-off blank we neither laugh at nor feel for. Not that the Hesses are whipping up a farce, exactly. Instead, this is another of their strange-accent buddy comedies. Jemaine Clement slowly takes over in the broad and baffling role of Boaz, a shifty Israeli huckster. He says junk like 'How am I supposed to bring the money? Produce it from the anus?' It worked for the screenwriters." —Alan Scherstuhl
2/13

Courtesy of IFC Films Every Thing Will Be Fine
"A disheartening case of When Auteurs Go Affected, Every Thing Will Be Fine confirms that Wim Wenders — making his first dramatic feature since 2008's Palermo Shooting — is a filmmaker now light-years removed from his Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire heyday. Egregiously airless and artificial, Wenders's latest (written by Bjørn Olaf Johannessen) concerns Tomas (James Franco), a writer whose perpetually blank face suggests existential misery (or is it just sleepiness?)." —Nick Schager
3/13

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Hot Tub Time Machine 2
"Returning screenwriter Josh Heald has scrapped everything that worked in the original, including the jokes. Instead of goofy but well-planned plotting — like the running gag of wondering when Crispin Glover's bellhop was going to sever his right arm — the structure of the sequel seems to be: Plop the gang in a weird location and wait for Robinson to improvise something funny." —Amy Nicholson
4/13

Courtesy of IFC Midnight Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
"Reveling in all manner of sexualized and defecation-centric degeneracy, and ultimately equating George W. Bush to Hitler for good faux–political commentary measure, Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as 'a poop-infatuated toddler')." —Nick Schager
5/13

Courtesy of Open Road Films Little Boy
"The kid prays and arggghs until the filmmakers, gauche and monstrous, cue up a jubilant 'This Little Light of Mine' for the payoff to a gag you will have dreaded since learning the film is called Little Boy and that 'Little Boy' is its small-fry hero's nickname. One morning his neighbors are dancing in the street, and the headline in the local paper credits 'Little Boy' with de facto ending the war. That God, always eager to smite foreign cities if you just believe!" —Alan Scherstuhl
6/13

Courtesy of Open Road Films The Loft
"It's hard to know exactly when The Loft, a disposable locked-room mystery about five yuppies who discover a corpse in their shared extramarital fuck-pad, decides to forgive its dickish main characters. Until the anticlimactic finale, the protagonists are defined by their abusive personalities, and since the film treats them as sentient plot points whose most distinct qualities are exhaustively explained through bland expository dialogue, they never evolve from well-dressed pond scum into sympathetically flawed characters." —Simon Abrams
7/13

Courtesy of Universal Pictures Minions
"Minions, as rambunctiously enchanting as they are, are probably best scattered in the margins of a movie, like loopy, wayward doodles. They lose some of their magic when they're front and center, on screen almost every minute. Minions isn't a disaster; it's probably just too much of a potentially good thing." —Stephanie Zacharek
8/13

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pan
"Pan is more evidence that big-budget studio entertainments now come from a sort of Build-a-Bear Workshop, where any unique part turns out only to be superficially different from the others. In this case, the bear has been set to 'PG' and 'Prebot,' stuffed with believe-in-yourself filler, and then sparkled over with some proper nouns from Barrie. But I defy you to look in its dead eyes, or at all the scenes and characters cribbed from Star Wars and Avatar, and tell me it's a bear you haven't seen dozens of times before." —Alan Scherstuhl
9/13

Courtesy of Open Road Films Rock the Kasbah
"Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Here, the Murray formula crashes into another tired pattern: Hollywood's insistence on reframing fascinating global stories so that they center on white American dudes of vision." —Alan Scherstuhl
10/13

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions Stonewall
"The social-media outrage the film stirred even before the reviews came in is entirely justified: Why does this movie about misfits of all races star the little gold man from the top of high school sports trophies? Why is it so scared of gay sex? Why does the famous riot just seem to happen, like one of Emmerich's pop apocalypses?" —Alan Scherstuhl
11/13

Courtesy of Screen Media Films United Passions
"As propaganda, United Passions is as subtle as an anvil to the temple. As drama, it's not merely ham-fisted, but pork-shouldered, bacon-wristed, and sausage-elbowed. The script is essentially a press release with speaking parts and exposition. The 'action' is a dulling catalog of frictionless, uninteresting administrative scenarios captured with blandly glossy photography and slathered in a syrupy orchestral score." —Ashley Clark
12/13

Courtesy of New Line Cinema Vacation
"Who, exactly, is Vacation for? Kids will end up seeing it, of course — they always do — but it will hardly scar them for life. It's not smart enough for that. Still, most of the jokes are just too vague and unshaped to be funny for anyone old enough to buy a ticket without a guardian." —Stephanie Zacharek
13/13

Scraping the Barrel: 2015's Worst Movies

If you don't already have enough reasons to be happy that 2015 has come to an end, remind yourself of the terrible movies that it produced — and hope that the films of 2016 aren't so bad that they have you wishing for a time machine of your own.

If you don't already have enough reasons to be happy that 2015 has come to an end, remind yourself of the terrible movies that it produced — and hope that the films of 2016 aren't so bad that they have you wishing for a time machine of your own.